Fact-checkers in 2026 pushed back on viral posts claiming 'Bill Gates' was personally releasing 30 million 'bacteria-infected mosquitoes' a week in Colombia, clarifying that the work is run by the World Mosquito Program — a not-for-profit owned by Australia's Monash University — not by Gates himself. The program breeds Aedes aegypti mosquitoes carrying the naturally occurring Wolbachia bacterium, which reduces the insects' ability to transmit dengue, Zika and yellow fever; city-wide deployments in the Medellín area between 2017 and 2024 protected millions of people and cut dengue incidence by roughly half. The Gates Foundation is a major funder of the method, having directed an estimated $185 million toward Wolbachia mosquito research since 2010. The accurate picture is a long-running public-health intervention, not the population-control scheme implied by the viral framing.